Taveras to Raimondo in new ad: We know better’

Wednesday

Jul 23, 2014 at 7:00 AM

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – With construction workers in hard-hats at a Prairie Avenue construction site as his backdrop, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras seeks, in a new TV ad, to refute gubernatorial rival Gina Raimondo’s attempts to blame him for Rhode Islan

Katherine Gregg Journal Political Writer kathyprojo

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – With construction workers in hard-hats at a Prairie Avenue construction site as his backdrop, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras seeks, in a new TV ad, to refute gubernatorial rival Gina Raimondo’s attempts to blame him for Rhode Island’s high-unemployment rate.

It begins with Taveras, in an open-collar shirt, looking straight into the camera and saying: “You’ve probably seen that ad where Treasurer Raimondo is blaming me for Rhode Island’s economy. We know better.’’

With images of Wall Street as his new backdrop, he says: “The state was already struggling when the Wall Street crash made it worse. As a new mayor I found a city on the brink of bankruptcy….”

“So I rolled up my sleeves and cut my own pay. Now our crime is down, unemployment is down…Jobs and construction are coming back. There’s more to do, but this I know: my opponent wants to throw stones from on high. I want to build a better future from the ground up.’’

As he talks the viewer sees headlines from The Journal, the WPRI website and CNNmoney, along with footnotes providing attribution for his statements about the city’s unemployment and crime rates.

In response to a Journal inquiries, his campaign produced a chart showing an overall 7.54 percent drop in violent crimes between 2010, which was the year before he took office, and 2013, and a 3.15 percent drop in property crimes. The campaign attributed these statistics to the state police.

On the employment front, the campaign produced a second chart showing the number of people working up from 70,579 in January 2011, when Taveras took office, to 72,586 in May 2014, and the unemployment rate down “by more than 20 percent” from 13.6 percent to 10.6 percent, along with “an uptick in construction jobs” in the Providence-Fall River-Warwick metropolitan area.

The campaign attributed these numbers to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The construction scenes were shot within the Providence Community Health Center Complex on Prairie Avenue in South Providence, on a site that was once home to two factories, including Federated Lithographers, and a tool shop, Beaman & Smith.

The groundbreaking for the $42 million health services, office and retail complex was announced in March 2011 with great fanfare, as a “move forward in the effort to improve health care access for many of the city’s insured and uninsured residents and also serve as a vital economic engine for the South Providence neighborhood

PCHC and its partners built a 40,200-square-foot clinic on the 3 1/2-acre full-block site, with a combination of private and public financing. Construction on second phase began last year, according to Journal news stories.

Taveras does not take credit, in the ad, for the project, but uses it as a visual counter-point to Raimondo’s ad featuring an out-of-work iron worker who says jobs have been scarce since Taveras took office, and jacked up the city’s commercial property tax rate.

As backup for his new ad, his campaign also pointed to the second phase of the city’s $40 million “road improvement project,” and an agreement reached this spring to convert the former South Street power station into a nursing school and academic center as further signs of construction activity underway or in the offing.

In response, the Raimondo’s campaign team issued a statement headlined: "Mayor Taveras concedes he is accountable for Providence unemployment rate."

"Just days after claiming that Mayor Taveras has as much to do with the Providence economy as he does the weather, his campaign is now running a TV ad talking about how good things are in Providence," said Raimondo spokeswoman Nicole Kayner.

She said the problem remains: "The 9.5 percent unemployment rate in Providence is worse than Rhode Island’s unemployment rate, which is tied for the highest in the country…And according to a recent study, Providence is ranked 50th out of 52 major metropolitan areas for economic momentum; only Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy, and Las Vegas are listed as doing worse.

“Why should voters trust that with Taveras as governor Rhode Islanders will see any significant economic progress?" Kayner said.